How to target your audience’s out of home interests, even when in isolation

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It’s not as easy to target your goal audience’s outdoor interests when their current movements are from the fridge to the bed – and back again.

While lockdown restrictions may be easing across Australia, we aren’t quite out of the woods yet.

Many businesses are choosing to remain closed for the immediate term, continuing to rely on online and takeaway orders. Other businesses will also be forced to consider implementing more permanent flexible working conditions as working from home becomes the acceptable norm.

Adapt and agile, marketers who have previously relied on people’s location data have also been forced to quickly innovate their technology to continue targeting their relevant audiences, who are forced to stay at home.

News Xtend, in partnership with our premium Hyperlocal Display partner, has developed key strategies in light of COVID-19 lifestyle changes, to target an ideal audience – wherever they are living their lives.

Targeting people based on their historical out-of-home activity

Our hyperlocal display’s prior-COVID-19 je ne sais quoi was its ability to target people in real life and in real time, based on their physical movements in the last 30 days. While 30 days may have been useful to capture an audience’s recent movements, audiences are now surely less adventurous – think less outdoorsy, and Netflix binging.

Thanks to recent updates in targeting technology, we are now able to target an audience who has been seen in real life, and in real time, in a certain location within the last 180 days.

This means that advertisers are now able to capture audiences’ location behaviours prior to coronavirus. This includes audiences who:

– visited your store in the last 180 days.

– have visited one of your competitors in the last 180 days, to target your competitor’s audience.

– have visited any location in the last 180 days which you deem important to target.

Sharing outdoor interests with the household

With working from home becoming the norm, visitations to the workplace over the last two months have decreased by 62%, while leisure activities outside of the home have decreased by 49%. Meanwhile, online residential activity has increased by 80%.

Targeting people based on their interests, now that they have been reduced to indoor interests, has become more difficult.

Our new ‘habits-to-home’ targeting, as part of our Hyperlocal Display package, leverages pre-COVID-19 historical location behaviours to reach not just the individual consumer in the home, but also everyone in their entire household, across all their devices.

Using IP data sets, analytics models and statistics, ‘habits-to-home’ targeting finds residential IP addresses and the set of devices which ordinarily reside at these households. The technology will also correct and remove any other devices seen temporarily in the household, in order to factor in any visitors to the household. Essentially, the technology will be able to hone in on which devices belong to a family of devices.

Allowing targeting to extend beyond just the consumer allows the household to better influence purchase decisions, by keeping a brand front of mind across a wider group. Many decisions are, in fact, better decided and influenced by a household rather than a single internet consumer, including:

–Supermarkets and FMCGs – reaching the entire household during COVID-19 and beyond, will allow you to capture the entire household who influences shopping decisions.

–Quick Service Restaurants – it is most likely to be a family or group decision as to which takeaway a household is going to order from next.

–Liquor consumers – targeting both people who frequented pubs prior to coronavirus, as well as targeting a household across multiple devices, as adults tend to drink together in a household.

–Automotive – while now might not be the best time to make an automotive purchase, staying front of mind is important as these types of purchase decisions are usually made collectively by families.

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With that in mind, it’s even more important for brands to stay top of mind, even when audiences are not on the move. Targeting the household as a collective, and across all devices, will keep a brand top of mind as the world’s biggest work from home experiment continues.